I had to implement A* at university, with a little application that also showed the status of the algorithm as it found the shortest path on a little ASCII bitm

I had to implement A* at university, with a little application that also showed the status of the algorithm as it found the shortest path on a little ASCII bitmap. It was probably one of the most fun and satisfying projects I did at university, alongside coding my own implementation of the RIPv2 routing protocol and my embedded systems projects (the last of which was creating a bluetooth controlled car with a webcam on it, which required us to design and build the entire board around a provided microcontroller). It was just so satisfying to implement something that just a couple of years prior was practically magic.